KALUTALIKSUAK - Kalutaliksuak
In times where every bedroom recording artists helps to flood the world with an ever growing number of CDs, you might wonder what’s the sense in remastering old basement tapes from a Russian proto-spacerock band that never even made professional recordings? Let’s leave this as a rhetoric question and have a look at the six mostly very long works featured on their self-titled album, which is actually the name of a malicious Eskimo goddess.
It would be preposterous to talk about songs, and even the titles give the impression as if they had only been coined fifteen years later so that the listener doesn’t have to be confronted with untitled material. Yes, we’re talking 1992-93. You fairly get the impression that the three artists are exploring textures on their instruments (guitar, bass and keyboards), and if they had had a live drummer, it would have been more accessible than the sometimes tinny sounding programmed beats.
That’s already the main point of criticism. As much as I am awed by improvisation, a mechanic backdrop always takes a certain amount of freedom away. The album has its best moments towards the end, when the two longest tracks, Crow-Quill Clothing (nearly ten minutes) and Put This Suckling Into Her Hood (nearly sixteen minutes), explore more ambient moods with guitar work at times even reminding of Robert Fripp’s soundscapes.
The album has been remastered by Alisa Coral from the equally obscure spacerock band Space Mirrors, and she did probably the best job that the old and dusty source material allowed for. If you need this very bizarre piece of musical history is only up to you. It is certainly very interesting but not really that relevant after all if you didn’t live in Moscow in the early Nineties, I guess.